Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL) created by Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) and Indian Union Health Ministry's Department of Ayush has documented over 200,000 formulations of Ayurveda, Siddha and Unani to save them from piracy. TKDL website will help in successfully thwarting attempts made by foreigners in getting patent on existing ancient Indian formulations.

After eight years of toil, over 200 scientists and researchers from the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) and Union health ministry's department of Ayush have scientifically converted information of traditional Indian medicine from Hindi, Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian, Urdu and Tamil to five international languages - English, Japanese, French, German and Spanish.

According to Dr V P Gupta from CSIR who created TKDL, India would lose 2,000 new patents every year without such a digital library.

In the past, patents have been granted by the European Patent Office (EPO) on the use of over 285 Indian medicinal plants such as papaya, Indian long pepper, kali tulsi, pudina, ginger, aloe, isabgol, aaonla, jira, soybean, tomato, almond, walnut and methi.

This is why India has now also signed a landmark agreement with the EPO. Under the three-year agreement, which came into effect on February 3, TKDL's database would be available to the patent examiners at EPO (34 member states) ‘for establishing prior art’, in case of patent applications based on Indian systems of medicine (ISM).